Anything you do could be the butterfly whose little wingflaps eventually result in the obliteration of the planet.
That is its central weakness.
But I think it had to be this way.
Terra Invicta is the result of the XCOMsubgenrestepping into grandstrategy.
For a start, you never do the fighting.
You’re more like Straker, the commander from the ancientTV seriesthatUFOcoloured itself in with.
Secondly, the vast bulk of that fight is domestic.
Each has a truly different vision for humanity, fundamentally incompatible with the others.
Each, too, is actually believable.
A techbro moronarchy whose plan is to build a colony ship and fly away.
They can actually represent a massive threat because they explicitly don’t care about Earth.
It’s so utterly asinine that it’s honestly a bit too real.
you’ve got the option to already tell how much I’m loving this, right?
Terra Invicta lives in your imagination in a way that recallsCrusader Kingsfar more than its actual structure does.
You have the run of the whole planet, divided by country (with a few mergers).
Your first step is to infiltrate these, and redirect their resources.
Taking the final control point lets you dictate its alliances, wars, and membership of multinational federations.
Terra Invicta models the solar system too, you see.
Zoom out enough and you’ll see every planet and moon and asteroid, all orbiting in real time.
Whatever your motive, your primary means are prospecting, mining, and militarising space.
It is a slow, slow, s l o w game.
It’s probably why it’s not strictly real time.
Every few weeks time pauses so it’s possible for you to order your agents.
Between that, everything happens in real time, almost always at maximum speed, and it’sveryrepetitive.
This game makes you a monster.
you might’t ignore anyone, and it’s important to mess with whatever they’re doing.
The unique research system ties into this, too.
There’s public research, which everyone can contribute to, and unlocks projects for everyone to research privately.
The downside is that the research tree is absolutely overwhelming.
I was already unlocking a dozen private projects for every one I could finish.
Naval hardware is particularly opaque.
Before my first ship, I had half a dozen engine research projects and nothing to contextualise them.
The notifications are a mess, too, with rolls of constant irrelevant information.
Being in the dark about practical matters means that building the wrong stuff is worse than useless.
I feel like even my successes are largely down to guessing well.
Why would they do that?"
while pondering the strategic implications.
Are they afraid I’ll use the army to invade?
Are they intentionally messing with me?
It’s recaptured something of UFO that many successors failed to: the sense of a genuinely unknown enemy.
Go into itassuming that you’ll lose, because this is about the journey.
I could barely cover half of what it does even with another article or two.
Terra Invicta is a fascinating, astonishingly ambitious game that nothing else can really compare to.
But there is almost no chance I will ever have time for it all.
